Lies
Fictional lies pose an interesting challenge. With the (many) lies we encounter in our daily lives, we understand that there is a reality that these lies are purposefully misrepresenting – that, even if we don’t know the truth, there is…
Category Essays
Wearing War
Not too long ago, and for a lot of the history of video games, the visual quality of a game has been decided entirely on how ‘realistic’ the graphics are. Using photo textures, true-to-life lighting models, and increasingly sophisticated shading…
Fantasy Patch Notes for Dishonored
I’ve been playing a lot of Dishonored over the past couple of weeks, and I’ve been, for the most part, loving my time with it. Of course, the more I enjoy a game, the more frustrated I get with the…
Situational
Playing a game is learning a set of habits, a set of reactions, and trying to tune and optimize those habits and reactions towards those that most frequently successfully achieve the game’s goal. Calling it a strategy might, sometimes, seem…
Live
I mentioned yesterday that I’ve been trying to livestream more gameplay (currently with a tenuous schedule of Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday @ 8pm, ). It’s interesting the sorts of pressures that streaming your gameplay puts on you – it…
Obstacles and Expression
Difficulty can serve several important roles in a game’s design: It can create an aesthetic sense of danger and foreboding, it can make the actions of the player feel more consequential, and it can push the player to vary their…
Ideas
Ideas are important. There are two conceptions we seem to have of what ideas are, what ideas do: The first is that the world runs on ideas, that new ideas fundamentally shift the world, and that just coming up with…
Jacked
If there’s a saying that’s haunted me over the years, it’s “Jack of all trades, master of none.” There’s a sense of causality implied here, suggesting that being a jack of all trades necessarily implies being a master of none…
More Problems
[INSERT FOOTAGE OF MAN IN BUSINESS ATTIRE TURNING AROUND IN LEATHER OFFICE CHAIR] Oh, hello, I didn’t see you there. My name is P. Rob LeMachin, CEO and sole proprietor of Problem Machine. Now, you might wonder what we do…
Invisible Walls
A thing about video games that I wonder sometimes if people really understand is that they’re made to be completed by the player. Dark Souls is made to be completed. Cuphead is made to be completed. The most challenging (or…